BMI Screws the Artists it's Supposed to be Helping

BMI stands for Broadcast Music Incorporated, which along with ASCAP and SoundScan are responsible for collecting and distributing royalty payments primarily to musicians, with other artists such as actors and voiceover folks too. These agencies are among the worst dinosaurs in terms of failing to adapt their business models to the reality of modern wired civilization.  Add to that outright accusations of corruption, highly overcompensated employees at most levels, and collection/shakedown tactics designed to buffalo small businesspeople into vastly overpaying for such innocuous acts as having a radio playing in the background in their store, and you have a slow motion train wreck, or an idea of what it was like to be a dinosaur stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits.
Here's a post from our friends at www.techdirt.com


For many years, we've written about how, for all their talk of "helping" artists, ASCAP and BMI are often harming up-and-coming musicians. That's because many musicians get their start playing local gigs at coffee shops and restaurants and the like, who often don't pay ASCAP or BMI. That should be fine, so long as the artists play only original songs, but ASCAP and BMI usually tell venues that they need to pay anyway, just in case someone plays a single covered riff. TorrentFreak has yet another such story, of a restaurant that stopped having a local band perform every Friday night after BMI demanded $3,000:

"I said the hell with it! We only have music on Friday nights. It’s not worth $3000. How is a neighborhood restaurant running on a razor-thin margin in this economy supposed to afford an extra $3000? So I cancelled the band. Net result? Our customers suffered, local music suffered. A complete lose-lose situation."

The bottom line to BMI and other collective rights organizations? Your customers are not your enemies. Promoting live music is good for BMI and the artists they collect royalties for. Working together with local businesses rather than trying to bully and intimidate them will leave all parties better off.

Of course, BMI and ASCAP don't really care. In the end, they're not there to protect the up-and-coming guys, but the huge acts who get the large checks.